A few months ago the Saturday Q&A at EV.com had a question about how and when did the racist bigots move from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and I realized that I could answer that one, as I pretty much lived through the bulk of the shift. As it happened, the answer that was given was reasonably similar to the one that I would have given, although it stopped short of where I would have continued with the consequences of the shift.

Today I’m going to give my answer to that question, and tomorrow I’ll conclude this little miniseries with the consequences of that voter shift. Spoiler Alert: the shift of all the racist bigots to the Republican Party is what eventually led to that rapist sitting in the Oval Office. If you want to read the EV.com answer, you’ll find it in their Sep 6th Q&A. Simply scroll down to the History section.

After the Civil War, Black voters were pretty solidly Republican voters, given that it was Lincoln who freed the slaves and it was Republican politicians who pushed for the amendments that gave Blacks the vote, etc.

As Frederick Douglass, an important leader of the Black civil rights movement in the 19th century, put it: “I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.”

Meanwhile, the Southern whites became very solidly behind the party that was opposed to freedom for Negroes, the Democratic Party, and the Solid South became a thing that lasted well into the 20th century. It was still the Solid South when I was in high school in the 1960s.

The Republican Party did very well winning the presidential elections throughout the rest of the 19th century, but after a while the GOP no longer did much of anything for the Negro race; it was able to win elections mostly with northern votes, and it kept on winning elections well into the 20th century. And after all, the purpose of political parties is to win elections. Period.

The Democrats pretty much continued as the party of the bigoted racists, even when Woodrow Wilson won the presidency, someone who should have known better, but he was one of the biggest bigots of them all.

Then along came the Depression and FDR gained the White House, and he began doing things for poor folks. Most black people were poor, and they noticed that he was a Democrat.

Then in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution prevented Marian Anderson from singing at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC, but Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband helped to organize a concert from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Once again, Black folks noticed. And they began to shift their allegiance to the Democratic Party.

Harry Truman did some more things for poor people and he tried to do even more but he was stopped by the southern bigots in his party when they noticed that his reforms would have helped Black folks. Still, the Republicans weren’t doing anything at all for Blacks, so just as there was a migration of Blacks from the south to the northern states after the Second World War, so there was a migration from the GOP to the Democratic Party.

This accelerated when Lyndon Johnson became president and muscled the Voting Rights Act through congress.

The bigots in the Republican Party took notice. Particularly people like Kevin Philips, a Nixon strategist who urged Tricky Dick to invite the Democratic racist bigots over to the Republican Party. This became known as the Bigot Strategy. Oh, no, sorry. It was a bigoted strategy but it became known as the Southern Strategy as that’s where the bulk of the Democratic white racist bigots lived. The northern states have their share of bigots as well, but they generally aren’t as openly gleeful about it as the southerners are. At least not until recently.

Reagan continued the trend by signaling that he was as racist as the worst of them, and eventually all the southern bigots had moved over to the GOP.

On the one hand one might say good riddance to bad rubbish, as this finally allowed the Democrats to move forward in ways that the southerners had always been holding them back. But on the other hand, it ended up with consequences that nobody seems to have foreseen.